Management Control System Use and Team Commitment

Recent Organizations are adopting teams’ structures to react to competition and enhance performance, but they do not fully achieve these objectives. Psychology literature argues that one of the main reasons for that is the lack of team commitment, which could be enhanced partially for the social identity of the team. Accounting literature argues that management control systems can be used as mechanism to motivate individuals in teams, and so enhance commitment. Using an experiment conducted among 120 post-graduate students, we test how team social identity and the interactive and diagnostic uses of the management control systems influence commitment to team’s objectives. Results generally support our hypotheses. Our findings show that an interactive use of management controls in teams is positively related to high level of teams’ commitment. Moreover, our results also support that the effect of social identity on teams´ commitment is moderated by the level of interactive use of management control systems in teams.